I won’t double indent, everything that follows is from Will and not from me:
“…you put up the post “MR commentator ‘Sure’ on YIMBY” and I wanted to send an email because I’m not sure I agree with the comment, given Rosen-Roback and some recent research in urban economics.
Sure writes that “what people want from their housing is overwhelmingly a short commute and low density,” which is only half right. People want amenities, including a short commute and space, but more importantly, they want good schools and a mix of local consumption goods.
One of the most important amenities for a school is its school district. Basically, any survey of home buyers ranks school districts at the very top of demands, and they show a willingness to give up space in order to be in better schools.
Then, there’s the broad notion of local consumption. Sparked by Miyauchi, Nakajima, and Redding (2021), urban economics is shifting to include smartphone data in order to understand the consumption side of agglomeration better. It is an area we know little about because data was so hard to collect.
Combining smartphone data with economic census data, the authors show that non-commuting trips are frequent, more localized than commuting trips, and are strongly related to the availability of nontraded services. From here, the authors augmented a standard model to incorporate travel to work and this hyper local travel. Their findings are powerful. Consumption access makes a sizable contribution relative to workplace access in explaining the observed variation in residents and land prices across locations.
So when Sure asks,
Suppose they do [liberalize housing], who is going to move in [to Arlington and Alexandria]? The guys who are buying in Chantilly because they want space? Or the guys crowded into a apartment building in NE DC who work in Foggy Bottom? I submit it will be the latter.
I think that’s probably wrong. The people moving into those homes in the suburbs will not want space but good schools first and foremost. So it very well could be people from Chantilly move to Arlington, but I would suspect that Arlington will get more people because they generally have better schools than Alexandria and others. Thus, the amenity of interest would be education not space.
Sure is right that “If we liberalize zoning everywhere (i.e. the YIMBY dream) then we should expect a net movement from the areas where people say they don’t want to live to the areas where they say they want to live.” But they misstep in thinking that “on net that means out of the urban core and into something less dense.” In the open-city Rosen-Roback model, generally speaking, liberalization of housing would mean people head into the urban core and into the suburbs.
In total, Sure seriously overweights commuting time and housing space, and underweights education as an amenity and local consumption.”
The post Will Rinehart on YIMBY and Sure (from my email) appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
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